Enterprises are increasingly moving their Information Technology (IT) infrastructures to the Cloud, driven by the promise of low-cost access to ready-to-use, elastic resources. Existing migration approaches typically replicate source resources and configurations on the target site, making it challenging to optimize the resource usage (for reduced cost with same or better performance) or cloud-fit configuration (no misconfiguration) after migration. The responsibility of reconfiguring the target environment after migration is often left to the users, who, as a result, may not reap the benefits of reduced cost and improved performance in the Cloud.
For instance, the promise of elastic, resilient, and flexible Cloud infrastructures, often associated with a pay-per-use model, is driving enterprises to migrate their legacy IT infrastructure. From startups to large enterprises with legacy data centers to government agencies, organizations with data centers of all sizes and requirements are interested in taking advantage of the cost savings and flexibility that the Cloud can offer. The question for enterprises of whether migration to the Cloud is the right strategy is now turning into the question of how to leverage the Cloud's abundance of resources for company benefit.
Existing migration processes typically move a site's source environment to a target environment of the user's choice, with post-configuration and optimization of the target left to the user. As a result, the benefits of a Cloud infrastructure may not reaped by consumers, since the target setup has not been customized to the Cloud environment. Post-configuration and optimization is often associated with high cost, especially for large data centers, due to the hands-on expertise that is required and the time necessary for manual execution of many of these activities.